Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  But one morning at the 12 × 12, as a particularly strong stench of the chicken factory blew in, I asked myself how people like Stan, Jackie, and Bradley find the inner strength to resist ecocide. As if in answer to this question, I discovered a copy of Gandhi’s autobiography on Jackie’s bookshelf and began reading it each night in her great-grandmother’s rocker. I knew Gandhi’s famous quote — “Be the change you want to see in the world” — but the question still remained: How? In his autobiography he talked about how he was convinced that absolutely anyone can achieve what he did; he was simply an average person who decided to transform himself.

  This transformation happened gradually when, as a young lawyer in South Africa, he decided there shouldn’t be a gap between his convictions and his actions. Each time he identified something in his outer life that contradicted his inner beliefs, he decided to make a change. For example, believing it wasn’t correct to eat meat, he immediately cut meat out of his diet. When he realized that buying British clothing supported the colonial system that oppressed his people, he began wearing a dhoti, spinning the cloth himself. And so he continued, one quick relinquishment after the next, until his outward actions gradually came into harmony with his beliefs. This not only built his character but inspired the confidence of others, turning him into the great, humble leader who would free hundreds of millions from the colonial yoke. In his own words, Gandhi was incredibly clear: changing yourself is the key; no external achievements, however noble, can replace that.

  From the rocking chair, I regarded the 12 × 12’s floor, a white slab of bare cement. So stark. An unadorned slab of rock surrounded by two full acres of breathing earth. Jackie later told me that she had mirrored Gandhi’s transformation, relinquishing one hypocrisy at a time, a gradual, deliberate evolution. She didn’t want to support war taxes, so she reduced her salary to eleven thousand dollars. She wished to have the carbon footprint of a Bangladeshi, so she went off the grid.

  Bradley, using his skills and interests, was doing something similar. He didn’t like the suburban sprawl he saw rolling into Adams County, so he began buying up large tracts of land and turning them into environmental eco-housing. Seeing that our educational system was perpetuating ecocide, he established innovative sustainable agriculture programs at the local community college. It was remarkable to feel the ripple effect of the courses he taught there, from horticulture to eco-design, from beekeeping to turning native plants into tinctures, medicines, and foods. Bradley shaped Jackie’s skill set, and she in turn inspired Bradley with her ideas. And they are part of a larger constellation of wildcrafters. My direct neighbor, José, made traditional Mexican furniture by hand. The Thompsons had left the city to produce organic chicken and pork. Lisa, up the road, was a social worker who’d bought ten acres and was slowly transforming herself into a small farmer. And a fascinating father-son team, Paul Sr. and Jr. — whom I was eager to meet — had purchased thirty acres outside a nearby town and had followed Jackie’s lead and built several 12 × 12s.

  Like Gandhi, these wildcrafters made one small change after another in their lives and watched their inner and outer lives slide into harmony. They were beginning to inhabit a place I’d later come to see as the creative edge.

  This idea first came to me in the 12 × 12, but only after leaving Jackie’s did I fully grasp the extent to which these folks are shaping their inner lives first, then moving on to shape their outer environment through living beyond paradigms — including paradigms of environmentalism. Wildcrafters, those who work with nature’s flow rather than against it, do this in a place that is, in the end, simultaneously internal and external: the creative edge, a dynamic geography.

  Wildcrafters on the creative edge have social and political impacts beyond their numbers. For example, the several hundred wildcrafters in Stan Crawford’s Dixon were only a few of the tens of thousands in New Mexico creating healthy, near-carbon-neutral communities. They voted on and passed innovative policies like the mandatory “media literacy” courses in schools, and they have grown the state’s Green Party into a force in state politics. Nationally, the Green Party has around two hundred elected officials, including members of city councils in Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Madison, and New Haven, and numerous mayorships. In Europe, Green Party inroads are stronger still; in Germany, the world’s third-largest economy, the Greens have controlled the powerful foreign minister position and other cabinet posts.

  This growing political and economic resistance, sadly, comes not from our elected and corporate leaders, but rather from gusanos (worms) that gradually eat away at the apple from within; when it collapses, it decomposes and becomes soil so something new can grow. I have several friends, for instance, who are gusanos within the California system, working on the creative edge of health care, education, business, and conservation, laboring to turn their state into something approximating their vision of America, in the hope that it will inspire the rest of the country as a model.

  What is particularly fascinating about the gusanos in North Carolina, my 12 × 12 neighbors, is that they did not choose to wildcraft in progressive Europe or in funky California, Vermont, or New Mexico. They’re in the conservative rural South. The late Jesse Helms used to have a lock on this area of North Carolina. The Thompsons, when they escaped to experiment on their new ten acres, were in a sense in rehab. The trailer park, the weapons and crack, neighbors in prison, the constant drone of commercial TV — all of this gone, cold turkey. They now opened their front door to a profusion of birds, a pond, a dark stretch of forest — to No Name Creek.

  While musing over all of this, one morning I noticed a cocoon attached to the deer fence. Was it from last year, or from a caterpillar that had already gorged itself on spring leaves and gone into an early cocoon? Around the 12 × 12, dozens of different-sized, -shaped, and -colored caterpillars and inchworms dangled from silk strings and attached to budding leaves. I came to marvel over the miracle of that cocoon and the transformation of one organism into a completely different one.

  Really, we’ve got the story wrong. We imagine that the caterpillar, knowing that it is time, goes to sleep in its womblike cocoon and wakes up a smiley, happy butterfly. That’s not what happens. As biologist Elisabet Sahtouris explains, the caterpillar devotes its life to hyper-consumption, greedily eating up nature’s bounty. Then it attaches itself to a twig, like the one on the deer fence, and encases itself in chrysalis. Once inside, crisis strikes: its body partially liquefies into broth.

  Yet, perhaps guided by an inner wisdom, what Sahtouris calls “organizer cells” go around rounding up their fellow cells to form “imaginal buds.” These multicellular buds begin to bloom into an entirely new organism but not without resistance. The caterpillar’s immune system still functions and thinks that the imaginal buds are a virus and attacks them.

  But the imaginal buds resist — and ultimately prevail — because they link together, cooperatively, to become a beautiful butterfly, which lives lightly, regenerates life through pollinating flowers, and migrates over vast distances, exploring life in ways that would have been incomprehensible to the caterpillar.

  Jackie, Bradley, the Thompsons, and the other people I was meeting were undergoing this transformation, not alone but in a network of hundreds of thousands of other “imaginal buds” throughout Pine Bridge, the United States, and the world. By allowing themselves the space to change, instead of clinging out of fear to what they knew, they were embarking on this transformative journey.

  BUOYED BY THIS EVOLVING REALIZATION of wildcrafting, the creative edge, and the possibility of transforming from caterpillars into butterflies, I found my spirit lighter than ever at the 12 × 12. One day I biked to Smithsville, rolling along South Main Street (the town was so small that there was no North Main Street), whistling and exchanging NC waves with the good folks in passing cars, until I arrived at Rufus’ Restaurant. My stomach growling, I decided to go in for lunch.

  The place was a quarter full, and I pee
red under the empty tables looking for an outlet to plug in my laptop. As I stooped, a waitress came over and cleared her throat: “’Scuse me,” she said. “But may I help you with something?”

  “I’m going to eat here,” I assured her.

  “Under one of the tables?”

  Chuckling from the other waitresses. Some of the conversations stopped. I reached up to pat down my hair, cowlicked as it was from my bike helmet; I probably looked crazy.

  “I’d like a table where I can plug in my laptop.”

  A completely blank stare.

  “My notebook computer. It hardly uses any electricity.”

  “See that clock?” she said.

  I looked across the room at an electric, unplugged DRINK PEPSI COLA ICE COLD clock stuck at 2:04 and 13 seconds. I sat down under it and plugged my laptop into the empty socket. One of the waitresses had been trying to hold in a big old laugh; when our eyes met, our mutual smile was the pinprick that caused her to burst. She was still chuckling and shaking her head when she came up to me and asked in a friendly Southern twang, “What can I get ya?”

  “What d’ya got?”

  “Well, we’ve got country steak. It’s not on the menu, and it comes with slaw, pintos, taters, fries, creamed potato, any two.”

  “What is country steak?”

  “Cubed steak.”

  “What’s that? Hamburger steak?”

  “Oh no, it’s meat that’s been cubed.”

  “So, cubes of meat. In sauce?”

  “Gravy, yes. But it’s been cubed and put back together. How do I explain this? Mary!”

  Mary groaned, as if to say, “How many times have I explained this?” I glanced around the restaurant interior; the decorations had been hanging on the walls for decades, mostly soda pop posters with long-dead ad campaigns like “Drink Dr. Pepper. Good for Life” and “Mountain Dew, it’ll tickle yore innards.” Another slogan, the text inside a three-foot-wide bottle cap on the wall, read obscurely, “Thirsty? Just whistle.” Whistle for what? I thought, the brand it was meant to elicit unknown to me.

  “It’s fried” came an impatient Southern twang from the other room.

  “Fried,” repeated my waitress.

  “Fried,” I said.

  “And it’s good!”

  “Okay, I’ll take your word for it.”

  “With what?”

  “Creamed potatoes. And slaw.”

  “Yeah, I think it’s cubed cow, because I’ve seen it in the cow section at the grocery store.”

  “Hold on,” I said, “so we’re not completely sure what animal we’re talking about?”

  She sighed and said, “I know it ain’t chicken.”

  There was good humor in our banter, but only later would I realize the ironies and complexities. For instance, I unconsciously judged Rufus’ for “backwardness” for not understanding the twenty-first-century lexicon 101: the laptop plug-in. Yet wasn’t my very presence there a Flat World advertisement, sidling up and whipping out my portable computer? That community still had what Bradley was trying to foster up the road in Siler City: life centered around people, not machines.

  Then there was a more insidious undercurrent: racism. During three visits to Rufus’ I never saw an African American person. By virtue of my white skin, I was basically a member of the club, hence the easy repartee with the white staff. Similarly, at Bobby Lu’s Diner in Siler City, I didn’t see any Latinos — despite the fact that Siler City is half Latino. Other restaurants in Siler City were purely Latino.

  There’s a grocery outpost a few blocks from Rufus’. Once, when the restaurant was closed, I went in and asked the clerk, a hirsute, heavily tattooed man in his forties, if they served food. He sighed and said, “Nope.” Behind his head hung chewing tobacco packets, raw sausage links, and packets of beef jerky. The remainder of the store was filled with possibly the world’s widest selection of 40-ounce beers and malt liquors.

  The only plausible lunch food was a Hot Pocket. I held it up, frozen stiff in its colorful little package, and asked if I could microwave it. “Sure,” he said. He was a man of few words, but not the guy who burst in next. This man’s voice boomed through the outpost for the next several minutes, as my Pocket got hot. He was already in midsentence as the front door flung open, a heavyset African American man with long braids tied into a ponytail, trailed by his wife. “… Oh do I see it. I see it! No, not the milk.” — his wife was pulling a gallon out of the refrigerator — “It’s this!” He hoisted a cold Colt 45 over his head like an Oscar.

  “I’ve been dreaming about it all day, since I woke up at five A.M. This is it, this baby…”

  Even as the man paraded up and down the aisles with his enormous malt beverage hoisted high, his wife lugging milk, bread, and TV dinners, two others were already lined up to buy 40-ounce bottles, including the quiet guy with a bushy, uneven mustache. He’d already opened his Colt 45. He took a long swig and then stared at the black man with intense, squinted eyes.

  The overweight black man had by now twisted open his 40-ounce and proceeded to kiss the label, work his tongue up the neck and into the opening. His wife, burdened with groceries, said, “Save some of that action for me.” Without the slightest hint of a smile, the clerk accepted food stamps for the groceries and cash for the beer. Before following his wife out, the man stopped tonguing the bottle long enough to say to the deadpan clerk, “Thank you, boss, for saving my life.” He then took a giant swig and disappeared on tiptoes after a perfectly executed curtsy.

  I felt ambivalent about this little drama on South Main Street. The two whites, the mustached man and the clerk, eyed the black man with obvious contempt. Was it purely about race or also about social class? Can you truly unbundle the two when racism is so deeply imbedded? The black man, though humorous on the surface, was also tragic: grossly overweight, on food stamps, already dreaming of his first 40-ounce during five A.M. insomnia. Was he resisting and transforming the racism around him or conceding defeat?

  “THE AMERICANS, THEY DON’T LIKE US,” my Honduran neighbor, Graciela, said to me in Spanish. “Sahes que son los ‘red-necks,’ verdad?” — “You know what rednecks are, right?”

  She was hosing down her lawn very unevenly, soaking one spot to flooding and then breezing over the patch beside it. Her husband was late again. For both Graciela and her husband, this was a second marriage; they each had teenage children from previous marriages. He worked three jobs; two involved landscaping on the side, with his main job “processing” thousands of chickens an hour in the Gold Kist factory. That morning, I saw him tear down our gravel road in his black mini-pickup, late for work. The first time I went over to introduce myself to them, he was guarded, evidently wondering why I spoke Spanish, why I’d chosen to stay in a shack with no electricity — sizing me up to see if I posed a threat. Like the vast majority of Siler City—area Latinos, he was illegal.

  “We’re like slaves,” Graciela said, staring at the water gushing out of her hose. “We work all the time, and it’s never enough to pay the bills.” Though she was only forty-three, the lines etched in her face made her look a decade older. She had a barrel-shaped midsection, large chest, and solid arms from her day job housecleaning and evening work at McDonald’s.

  As we spoke, a wave of empathy washed over me. Hearing the Spanish, I felt as if I was back in Latin America, where I’d lived for five years, and where, on so many occasions, I had seen giant multinational companies underpaying people in sweatshops, on industrial soy plantations, and in fast-food restaurants. Was this any different? She was barely earning enough to get by. Yet Graciela was one of the lucky ones. Of Siler City’s thousands of Latinos, she was one of the few who owned a house, thanks to the nonprofit group Habitat for Humanity. She praised Habitat on several occasions, saying that her mortgage was only four hundred dollars a month, including taxes, which was considerably less than she had been paying for rent. My mother, while visiting me at Jackie’s, remarked: “You can tell Graciela’s
family loves their house.” There was the tidy lawn, newly planted flowers — even a little doghouse with a lightbulb that glowed at night.

  One day, arriving home in her greasy McDonald’s uniform, Graciela said to me: “Life seems good here if you’re American. But only if you’re American.”

  José, in his identical Habitat home across from Graciela, was less open. Though he was incredibly friendly, and he would invite me over to dinner and into his woodshop to see a newly crafted piece of furniture, he always seemed guarded. When we’d talk about certain topics, he’d clamp down or change the subject. I wondered if he was undocumented, even though he’d been in the United States for two decades.

  At one point I said to José, “I never see your son playing with the Thompson kids.” It seemed odd, since Mike’s eldest son, Zach, was the same age as Hector.

  “Oh, he doesn’t like to play so much,” José said.

  “He likes to be alone?”

  “No, he plays with Graciela’s kids all the time, just not with the Americans.”

  It always threw me off a bit when my Latino neighbors referred to “the Americans” as if they were a separate ethnic group, and perhaps one not to be melted into. I noticed a struggle in José’s face, as if figuring out just how to say something. Always diplomatic, he never wanted to stir anything up. “My son says that — what’s his name, Mike?”

  “Yes, Mike Thompson,” I said, surprised that after a year living here he wasn’t sure of his white neighbor’s name.

  José continued: “He says Mike looks at him in a certain way. Maybe…” — he hesitated, then shrugged — “maybe a racist kind of way.”

  10. WHITE

  THERE’S A POWERFUL DOCUMENTARY called Dare Not Walk Alone about St. Augustine, Florida, a city that Martin Luther King Jr. targeted in the 1960s as a place to challenge racist segregation laws. Weekly protests and vigils were held, but violence eventually erupted, including a white hotel owner pouring acid on black children who had jumped into his pool. Images of that incident and others shot around the world, and these events contributed to the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Afterward, the white elites of the town retaliated against blacks by cutting them off economically and wiping out evidence of the civil rights struggle. Even the old slave market had no sign of ever having been a slave market — not one historical plaque existed in the town. The film ends with two black sisters visiting the church where they were once brutally cast out for being of the wrong race. Members of the white congregation receive the sisters in a powerful act of reconciliation, hugging and weeping, letting decades of pent-up shame spill over. The white congregation needed forgiveness more than the sisters — who had gone on with their lives — needed to forgive.